The dairy down the road

My friend Ornella, with whom I sometimes play piano-violin sonatas, recently moved to a sweet house in the countryside just a few minutes outside of town. She and her husband are renovating it. She says the holes in the shutters were made by woodpeckers.

Her neighbors include a farmer who rows tomatoes for Mutti, another who raises wheat and hay, and the smallest caseficio (dairy) in the Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano, the consortium that guards the quality and reputation of the cheese we call Parmesan. So when my brother and his wife came to visit and expressed a desire to see a small cheesemaker, Ornella kindly put me in touch with her neighbor Federico, and one morning we went over to visit.

First Federico introduced us to his cows. The dairy has 90 of them, which seemed like a lot to us city folk, but Federico told us that a lot of the bigger operations have something like a thousand animals. 

Not that long ago there were lots of small farms in the area with five or six cows each, he said. They sold their milk to bigger dairies where cheese was made. But the milk quality wasn't consistent and anyway most of those little farms haven't survived. Apparently nowadays you need your own herd to be even a small-scale cheesemaker in the Consorzio big league.

Federico's dairy is family-owned. As we came through one of his uncles, Giorgio, was pitchforking hay (or is it straw?) into the grinder they use to make feed for the cows. 

After showing us the milking room, with its ten milking machines, Federico took us into the spotlessly clean room where the milk is mixed with rennet and whey and allowed to curdle in giant copper vessels.

The curds are then packed into forms and allowed to set. Federico cut a slice off of one pre-cheese for us to taste. It was unsalted, fresh but bland, with a teeth-squeaking texture.

Here's Federico rewrapping the new cheese after we'd sampled it. That big pot in the background is full of whey. The forms on the metal table are cheeses a day or two older than the one he's wrapping.

The cheeses are imprinted with a form that identifies them as Parmigiano-Reggiano, from this particular dairy. In addition, each cheese gets a unique identifying number.

Across the way was a chilly room with a giant tub of very salty water in which the firmed-up cheeses bathe for 28 days.

They have to be turned several times a day to make sure they're evenly salted. Then they're allowed to sit and dry out for a while before moving into long-term storage.

 

This was another small outbuilding full of shelves that were full of cheeses. The white ones are the youngest. As the cheeses age their rinds turn golden and then reddish brown. In the lower corner of the photograph is the machine that keeps the cheeses clean. As they get older they sweat oil, to which dust and bugs would stick if the cheeses weren't regularly brushed off. 

The tour ended with a taste of Federico's delicious two-year-old cheese. Two to three years is the preferred age range for most uses of Parmesan. (The redder ones in the photo are three years old.) He showed us how as the cheeses age and lose moisture the grains of naturally occurring monosodium glutamate get more prominent, giving the cheese greater flavor and crunch.

Of course we wanted to take some of this stuff home. We bought a hunk of the 24-month cheese and also a piece of a youthful one-year-old, what's known locally as "table cheese" because it's mild and sweet and good eaten in chunks at the table, rather than just grated into food. 

I can't claim to have enough of a palate to notice that Federico's product tastes different from the other high-quality Parmesan I've had in the neighborhood. Federico, though, is nothing if not a lover of cheese as well as a maker. He told us he can taste the difference between his own summer and winter cheese. In fact, he says that each cheese they make tastes a little different, that each has its own personality. Looking at them en masse, I can kind of see it.

Since our visit I keep thinking about how much work this dairy requires, work that has to be done every day, all year long. The cows have to be milked at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day, the milk has to be processed, the cheeses have to be moved from this stage to the next, turned, stored, cleaned, on a rigid schedule. How fortunate that people like Federico are still willing to do all this so that indolent slobs like me can have the pleasure of eating well.